The art world we now possess has fully accustomed us to the idea of time-based art. This, after all is what artists’ video delivers – images that are not steadfastly

Edward Lucie-Smith (left) with Stephen Vince and the dissolving sculptures at Kinetica London 2014

there, for leisured scrutiny, but which continuously morph as we look at them. It is also, to some extent, what is delivered by mobiles, concatenations of forms whose relationships are constantly changing.

The idea here, however, is that the artwork disappears, folds into itself, vanishes, offering a metaphor for the destructive processes triggered by human activity that are slowly destroying aspects of our planet and that may, in the long run, render it unfit for human habitation. In other words, the final metaphor is that humankind, as a species, is in the process of destroying itself.

Tree of Gold melting away 2014

However what participants in these groups seemed to envisage was a culture of wreckage, a pulling down of established social structures, made visible through a deliberate destruction of physical objects. What these new time-based art works allegorize is not destruction of this sort, wreckage as a form of creation, its violent anarchy still showing the marks of human hands. Instead they speak of a gradual effacement of all human traces, and with them, eventually, of the whole of the natural world as we currently know it, reducing our planet to the condition of a barren sphere.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Kinetic Destruction - The Dissolution of the Art of Stephen VinceAs seen at the recent London Kinetica Museum Art Fair, October 2014The Truman Building, Shoreditch, London

'As the creatures of this world steadily disappear into extinction before our very eyes, so Stephen Vince translates this disturbing phenomenon into Art', Savanna Fine Art